''The Inferior Role of Chronicler'

One of those dates we remember, though the events were faraway and hardly touched us personally: December 12, 1981. All 3.4 million private telephones in Poland went dead and would remain silent for a month. The arrests started at 11:30 p.m. Within twenty-four hours, some 5,000 Poles  had been detained. Tanks and troops patrolled the streets. That day in Gdańsk, Solidarity had convened to discuss lobbying for a referendum to call for multiparty elections in the Polish People’s Republic. Within a day, General Jaruzelski, the Soviet Union’s Stalinist tool, declared martial law. 

Zbigniew Herbert had recently returned from Berlin. He was back in Warsaw when the tanks rolled in. For the fourth time in his life, one of Herbert’s cities had been invaded. Like Osip Mandelstam and Constantine Cavafy, he was preeminently a poet of the city. I’m reminded of Guy Davenport in “The Symbol of the Archaic” (The Geography of the Imagination, 1981):

 

“The unit of civilization is the city. The classical ages knew this so well that they scarcely alluded to it intellectually. Emotionally it was a fact which they honored with rites and a full regalia of symbols.”

 

The first edition of Herbert’s Report from the Besieged City was published in 1983 by internees in the Rakowiecka Prison in Warsaw. Most copies were seized and destroyed. A second edition was published the following year by Wydawnictwo Dobra Powszedniego (Publishing House of Good Covenant) in Warsaw. The third edition in Polish came out in Paris in 1983. John and Bogdana Carpenter used this version when they translated Report from the Besieged City (Ecco Press, 1985). The title poem stirringly begins:

 

“Too old to carry arms and fight like the others—

 

“they graciously gave me the inferior role of chronicler”